Corey Mesler Commentary

My father really worked all his life for DuPont. The plant, where family could only visit one day a year, was a place of mystery for me. Also mysterious was what my father did all day. Or indeed what DuPont did all day. I knew it was something to do with chemicals so I imagined Dr. Jekyll’s lab. Now, my father is gone from the world but the chemical plant lives on. The ergot was added to the poem by my friend Rebecca who lives “out near the chemical plant.”



Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). His first full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations, appeared in March 2009. He also has two novels set to be published in the Spring of next year, The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (Bronx River Press) and Following Richard Brautigan (Livingston Press). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, (1988), and Chloe, (1995). With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.